Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I apologize for my lateness. The only way I could get here from Khartoum was to fly through New York to Burlington and to then drive up from Burlington. So I've come straight from Khartoum, via New York and Burlington.
I should tell you something about my organization first. I direct an organization called FAR, which is based in Toronto. It's a Canadian organization. I'm also the vice-chair, currently, of the INGO Forum. I represent 72 international NGOs in northern Sudan. For the last four years I've been either chairing or co-chairing the INGO Forum, so I come with that perspective as well. Before I worked for FAR, I worked on the peace process in Naivasha and then in Abuja and Asmara, to the east of Sudan.
That's something brief about my background.
It's good to have the opportunity to be back in Canada. Thank you very much for that.
As I started to say, I come from a Sudan that is quite fearful at the moment. There's a lot of uncertainty about the future, and people are very nervous. There's conflicting information coming about the future with regard to citizenship, population movements, and that kind of thing. There's a lot of intimidation and a lot of pressure to vote in the referendum in a certain way. People are being beaten up if they're suspected of voting for unity—that's southerners in the north. We've recently had the expulsions, also, of Arab groups from Upper Nile in the south and an increasing movement of southerners from the north to the south.
My agency runs the wharf in Kosti, in White Nile, which is a place that all the IDPs going to the central and southern part of southern Sudan pass through as they travel on the barges. We've seen an increase from 800 people last week to 6,000 this week. There is a dramatic increase in people moving southwards. This is in advance of the registration period, which starts, as you know, in just under two weeks.
I think one of the challenges we face, always, in Sudan is the question of numbers. You've heard in previous submissions to this committee differing figures of citizenship in Sudan, from 8.2 million up to 16 million. To register to vote, you have to trace your lineage back to a southern tribe. That's usually meant to be within four generations. I dread to think where Canadians would come from if you were allowed to claim nationality from four generations back. Clearly, there's a challenge there about who is really southern and what that means for the vote.
We've moved to a place where the government, in a sense, has tried to downplay significantly the number of southerners in the north, because they feel that to be to their advantage. Now they're quickly trying to inflate the numbers of southerners in the north. We've gone from a claim of one-half million southerners in the north to claims of between 1.5 million and 2.7 million southerners in the north. That's quite significant. On the other hand, even if one added to the figure of 10.5 million southerners taken at the CPA, the 2.7 million maximum figure that's been quoted by some sources, and if you assume a normal developing world demographic--meaning half the population is under 18 and therefore half is eligible to vote--we'd still need, even if everybody in the north at the maximum figure voted for unity, one in eight people in the south to vote for unity for a majority to win. So I think we can assume that the south is going to separate.
For us as NGOs, I think that has two main impacts, and I should focus on those, given the limited time. One is the question of contingency planning--how to plan the repositioning of resources, how to anticipate the movement of people, and how to respond to those needs--particularly, for example, the question of UNMIS. It is being asked to provide more troops for the border area. But it is also being asked to provide support for the referendum process. How will they balance, with their limited resources, the need to be manning polling stations and the need to be manning the border where the oil fields are and where the likely clashes will be? That will be a significant challenge.
The other one, of course, is humanitarian access.
At the moment, in Darfur, you have a northern government still bombing. And they don't have military reasons for doing this; they have terrorizing reasons for doing this. I hesitate to say this in a public forum, but I think it's very clear that the Government of Sudan has a dual strategy. One is trying to starve populations whom they believe to be supportive of rebel groups by denying any humanitarian agency the access to those areas and basically forcing them to have no food, no water, and no basic services. It's slightly better this year because we had a good rainy season, which is just finishing, so the situation is perhaps not as bad as it would have been this time last year. The other strategy the government has is to try to incentivize recovery, or use recovery as a political tool--I should express it like that. They will go to an area and say, if you stop harbouring rebels, we'll build you a school. They come to us, the NGOs, and say, go to that village and build a school; we promised them one. We say, no, we can't possibly do that. We would then be a political tool of the government and we take the fall for there being no service provided.
We're in a very difficult position, politically, where the discourse has moved away from the basis of need towards using humanitarian intervention as a political tool, and that's something we're very cautious to avoid where we can.
The reason I mention this in the context of this committee--looking particularly at the referendum--is there's a good chance that the government in the north and the government in the south, which I'm afraid, in a kind of Stockholm syndrome way, has copied many of the mistakes of the north, will deny access to humanitarian workers of any area where they feel the local population is not entirely supportive of them. That could be, for example, the entire Kingdom of Shilluk in Upper Nile--I don't want to get too geographically specific because I don't know how well you know the country. There are going to be areas of the country where the people are not necessarily considered to be entirely supportive of the northern government or the southern government where we could well be denied access and where services will not be provided.
I think perhaps I'll leave it there, because that gives enough of a flavour for now and I don't want to overuse my time. We can wait for questions if there are more clarifications required.